UN Now Reporting Half as Many Deaths of Women and Children in Gaza

A U.N. flag is flown at the main entrance of the "Palais des Nations" building, which houses the United Nations office, in Geneva on Oct. 20, 2023. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

The United Nations appears to have revised the estimated casualty figures in Gaza, lowering the previous fatality numbers for Palestinian children and women killed in the Israel–Hamas conflict.

On April 22, the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated that the war had resulted in 34,151 fatalities, including 14,500 children and 9,500 women, citing the Hamas-run Government Media Office (GMO) as the source.

There were no details about the number of men killed in the conflict.

OCHA later disclosed in a May 8 update that 34,844 people had been killed in the war, of which 24,686 were identified as of April 30. Among those identified were 7,797 children and 4,959 women, totaling about half the previous number of deaths reported for women and children.

More than 10,000 individuals were reported missing and were not included in the total death count, according to the agency, citing GMO and the Palestinian Civil Defense as the sources.

These changes have raised concerns about the reliability of the U.N. data.

David Adesnik, director of research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in a statement on the foundation’s website that the U.N. may have “recognized the lack of evidence” behind Hamas’s original claims on the casualty figures in Gaza.

“If so, the UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months,” he said.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, stated on social media that “there is no method or standard of proof” for the casualty counting in Gaza.

“The UN simply parrots Hamas numbers, the source laundered by the UN as ‘Gaza Ministry of Health’ or ‘Government Media Office.’ In fact, both are run by terrorist Hamas,” Mr. Neuer wrote.

“The truth is that when it comes to Israel, it’s clear the UN’s goal is not accuracy, but rather to immediately seize on any report, no matter how unsubstantiated or even manifestly false, in order to portray Israel as malevolent.”

Mr. Neuer urged the U.N. to declare its casualty count in Gaza as “a complete failure,” referencing how the agency stopped updating the death toll from Syria’s civil war in 2014 when it could no longer verify the sources of information.

“If UN officials continue to legitimize a Hamas-run system that is now shown to be completely false, they will be complicit with terrorist propaganda,” he stated.

UN’s Explanation for Revised Data

Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told reporters on May 10 that the agency would typically adjust the figures “many times over the course of a conflict.”

“In the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” Mr. Haq said at a news briefing.

“We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross-check them. As we cross-check them, we update the numbers, and we'll continue to do that as that progresses.”

When asked about the reliability of the data, Mr. Haq said that the fact that the agency is “continually checking them” indicates that the numbers can still be deemed reliable.

A January report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy states that the figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry since Nov. 1, 2023, lack credibility because they were derived from news stories rather than hospital and morgue data.

The casualty numbers reported by news sources are unverified and may not include the number of terrorists killed in the war.

“This admission, which goes unnoted in OCHA publications or elsewhere, raises multiple methodological concerns,” the report reads.

“News reports are more likely to specify the number of women and children killed than men or combatants due to the dramatic nature of women and children’s deaths and local pressure to downplay Israeli actions against combatants.”

According to the report, the Gaza Health Ministry and GMO have regularly downplayed the fatality count of men, and “the general pattern of statistics shows an improbably low proportion of deaths among males.”

“Hamas’s GMO—part of the group’s propaganda machine—is particularly active in pushing the narrative that a large majority of deaths are women and children,” the report states.